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It's so hard to get a good tradesman these days. That
lament is not just common, it's true, writes Paul
Robinson.

Simon Cook remembers coming home shabby and dirty, with hands
humming from a day of lugging and laying hundreds of bricks. He
especially recalls his school friends, who were at university
studying science, arts or commerce, poking fun at his bedraggled
tiredness.

"I'd come home buggered and collapse on the couch and they'd
laugh at me. My mates thought I was crazy being a bricklayer. They
went to uni or had cushy little office jobs. But it's funny, I'm
laughing at them now."

Cook is one of a rare breed - and getting rarer. While his
friends at Pembroke College, in leafy Mooroolbark, were told by
teachers and careers advisers to study hard, go to university or
pick a career in the IT or hospitality industries, Cook became a
brickie. Apprentice wages of about $250 a week were "a bit hard to
take", but things improved. At 26, he earns $75,000 a year working
a 36-hour week plus "a few Saturdays" for builder Byrne
Constructions - typical of what most brickies are earning.

With a bit of overtime, he says, he could earn more than
$90,000, but why work that hard? He has already bought a house in
Montrose and owns two cars. He also won apprentice of the year in
1999 and 2000, bagging handy cash and a bootload of tools.

While the current climate might be good for Cook and skilled
tradesmen like him, the Reserve Bank and a chorus of economists are
warning it is not good for Australia. They say that earlier
decisions, including the privatisation of government utilities and
phasing out of traditional technical schools, have left the nation
facing permanent shortages of skilled labour.

This week, Cook found an unlikely admirer in Prime Minister John
Howard, who urged young people to leave school early and get a
trade.

Howard told national television: "We went through a generation
where parents discouraged their children from trades . . . High
year 12 retention rates became the goal, instead of us as a nation
recognising there are some people who should not go to university.
What they should do is at year 10 decide they're going to be a
tradesman. They'll be just as well off and in my experience and
observation greatly better off than many others."

Howard was talking after the release of a report that showed the
Government's New Apprenticeships program had experienced a decline
in traditional trades where there are now desperate skills
shortages. The Skills for Work report, compiled by the Education,
Science and Training Department, showed the number of people
starting trade apprenticeships had dropped by 2300 between 2000 and
2003, while sales and service traineeships - where there are no
real shortages - had risen by 25,000.

NOWADAYS try and get a brickie, a plumber, a
plasterer or an electrician to make minor repairs on your home.
Minimum waiting time is a week. Speak to building companies and the
problems are magnified tenfold.

Shortages are having a major impact across industry and are
threatening to undermine national productivity. The average age of
a welder is 55. A Dandenong company called Vawdry, which makes
trays for trucks, went to China recently and hired 60 "guest
welders" because it couldn't find enough skilled local workers. An
employment agency in Perth went to South Africa last year and
recruited 100 boilermakers because of the shortage of metal
workers.

In Victoria, at least 20,000 positions for skilled and technical
people in manufacturing remain unfilled. Worse still, up to 30 per
cent of young people who do choose apprenticeships are not
finishing them.

But skill shortages are not confined to the trades. The CSIRO
cannot get statisticians, which is impeding growth in the
biological sciences industry. The lack of engineers is also
undermining Australia's China-driven minerals boom. Much-needed
infrastructure projects around the country are being held back by a
lack of municipal engineers.

Locating blame is complex.

As part of its New Apprenticeships program, the Howard
Government expanded the traditional scheme from classic trades to
"traineeships" across a range of industries including retail,
hospitality and IT. These courses were much shorter - often only a
year - and involved substantial subsidies to industry, many of
which, critics say, were rorted.

John Spierings, a researcher with the Dusseldorp Skills Forum,
says the Government confused things by promoting the short-term
traineeships. Apart from targeting the wrong industry areas, he
says, this policy merely reassigned existing workers as apprentices
and offered employers the same annual dollar incentive to take on a
one-year trainee as a four-year apprentice.

In the late '80s and early '90s, Victoria's Labor government
abolished technical schools, encouraging children to stay at
secondary school to year 12. Soon after, then federal ALP education
minister John Dawkins decided to rebrand the major technical
colleges, such as RMIT, as universities. In the face of pressure to
divert young people into the IT and biotech industries, the
traditional path for young people interested in a trade all but
disappeared.

John Spierings says that between 1993 and 2002, there was a 16
per cent decline in the training rate - which shows how regularly
tradesmen are being replaced by apprentices - for the metals,
building, construction, vehicle and electrical trades compared with
the previous decade. The decline represents an estimated 19,000
lost jobs.

Skills shortages, particularly in Victoria, have also worsened
since the privatisation drive of the '90s, when the State
Electricity Commission, the Gas and Fuel Corporation and the rail
and tramway networks were broken up and sold off. These giants had
employed hundreds of apprentices each year, forming a de facto
training ground for private industry. When they were sold, the
private sector failed to pick up the slack.

"Governments have continued to pump big money into training, but
the employers are the tardy performers," says John Buchanan, of the
Australian Centre for Industrial Research and Training. "The SECV
used to take on a couple of hundred apprentices every six months. I
was in the Latrobe Valley a while ago and there were only about six
employed by the big power companies."

Buchanan says major skills shortages are often a warning that
recession is on the way: "That was the case in the 1980s and again
in the 1990s."

Philip Green, director of the National Electricity Contractors
Association, says the privatised firms did cut back dramatically on
apprentices, but this is now changing: "When the SECV, Gas and Fuel
and the railways were in business they ran the place partly as a
public service. They trained far more apprentices than they needed
and many eventually went into private industry. When they were sold
up, the notion of efficiency and business principles came into
play."

Green says the utilities were also sold "over the odds", forcing
the new owners to look for savings: "They also contracted out a lot
of work that was originally done in-house and the margins narrowed
all round. A decade down the track, they are starting to realise
they have to employ more apprentices."

But the wheel turns slowly. A survey of 768 companies compiled
recently by the Australian Industry Group shows small firms hire
more apprentices - 45 per 1000 employees - compared with 17 per
1000 in large firms.

The shortage of skills can also be sheeted to Australia's ageing
population. The number of people available for all types of work is
declining because of our low birth rate and ageing skills base.
Research by workforce consultants Drake International predicts
Australia will face permanent shortages across many industry
sectors by 2010.

Drake marketing manager Andrew Dingjan says this will make it
harder for business to stay productive. Nationally, he says, it
could see Australia's GDP growth fall by 1.5 per cent over the next
40 years: "We estimate 85 per cent of all workforce growth will be
supplied by people aged 45 and over by 2012, up from 32 per cent in
1992. This is a phenomenal shift in just 20 years."

THERE are 6000 brickies in Victoria, with an
average age of about 46. There are now 600 in training, but only
150 will qualify, leaving a shortage of about 4000 tradesmen. About
seven years ago, a brickie was paid about $500 to lay 1000 bricks.
Today he can charge double that.

There are two ways to get an apprenticeship. One is through
employer-funded group training schemes, the other is through
on-the-job training with a single company, which receives
government grants ($4000 in the case of brickies) to do the
training.

In Cook's case, he took a holiday job with a brickie, a mate
from the local footy club: "I was labouring at $100 a day between
7am and 6pm . . . the boss thought I showed a bit of ability and
offered me an apprenticeship. When I signed the papers my wage came
down to about $250 a week. That was a bit of a struggle."

For many, it seems, it is too much of a struggle. Cook's project
manager at Byrne Constructions, John Grasso, says Byrne runs the
largest gang of brickies in the state, 70 at last count, but it
battles to find quality tradesmen. It has only two apprentices.

Grasso says Byrne is under pressure to produce and that
apprentices are not as productive as tradesmen: "It's hard to get
kids to stick to apprenticeships. A lot leave during the first
year. It's a hard slog to begin with and the pay's not too good.
Something needs to be done there."

Holmesglen TAFE's Brian McKenzie says secondary schools need to
improve the image of TAFE as a career path. He says more than
10,000 school children are now participating in a Vocational
Education and Training certificate for years 11 and 12: "What we
are saying to these kids is to be a doctor is fine, but it is also
fine to be a brickie."

Cook has no problem with that. "I'm happy doing what I'm doing.
I've had the last laugh. And who knows," he jokes, "I might buy
another house."